Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish well into the twenty-first century—gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its voice to the chorus of post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of... and An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at...
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at... and Theaters of Citizenship investigates independent Egyptian performance practices from 2004 to 2014 to demonstrate how young dramatists staged new narratives of citizenship outside of state institutions, exploring rights claims and enacting generational identity. Using historiography, ethnography, and performance analysis, the book traces this avant-garde from the theater networks of the...
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at... and Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies examines the key role that the law and legal frameworks played in the ways Shakespeare explored character and selfhood.
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at... and Screening Auschwitz is the first and definitive discussion of the classic Polish Holocaust film The Last Stage (Ostatni etap). Directed by Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska, The Last Stage was the first film of its kind. Marek Haltof has incorporated a wealth of new sources to trace the creation of this...
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at... and Muslims in Kenyan Politics explores the changing relationship between Muslims and the state in Kenya from precolonial times to the present, culminating in the radicalization of a section of the Muslim population in recent decades. The politicization of Islam in Kenya is deeply connected with the sense of marginalization that...
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. and Will the future be one of economic expansion, greater tolerance, liberating inventions, and longer, happier lives? Or do we face economic stagnation, declining quality of life, and a technologically enhanced totalitarianism worse than any yet seen? The Fabulous Future? America and the World in 2040 draws its inspiration from a...
Since the official adoption of the Islamic legal system by the state governments in Northern Nigeria, Islamic figures in the religious public sphere have amplified their censure of homosexuality as a 'social illness' and 'depravity of depravities' incommensurable with the ethics that govern the discourse on gender and sexuality in...
It is no secret that Southeast Asia has long been a major source of opium production, providing a lucrative enterprise for European empires in the 19th-20th century. The “Golden Triangle” region, where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand’s borders meet has been one of the world’s largest opium producers since the 1950s....
Convent education was financially accessible to many girls whose families could not afford a private tutor and nuns were the largest group of educated, culturally-active women in pre-modern Europe. Convent education mirrored the general contours of humanist education by associating learning with morality, serving the purposes of the Venetian republic,...
Holy Mediocrity: Saintly Matrons and the Dominicans in Late Medieval Italy', 'Julia Lauren Miglets', 'The task of this study is to explain why a cluster of female saints who were noted not for their miracles but for the moderate even boring quality of their sanctity, a paradigm I call holy...
In the wake of Hurricane Katrinas dramatic demographic changes, scholars, journalists, and politicians have discussed Mexican migration to New Orleans as a new phenomenon and an unwelcome threat to the citys social order, rich culture, and tourist economy. This dissertation challenges these ideas and demonstrates some of the myriad ways...
A spokesman for the American Revolution, John Adams, famously claimed that a third of colonists supported independence, a third supported Britain, and a third remained neutral. Since then historians have struggled to understand the mixed loyalties of the Revolutionary generation.
"The Popular Politics of Loyalism During the American Revolution, 1774-1790,"...
The unprecedented crimes of World War Two, especially those committed by the Nazi state, unleashed an equally unprecedented effort to hold perpetrators accountable and secure justice for millions of victims. This effort encompassed hundreds of trials of thousands of individuals in the immediate postwar period and continues to the present...
This dissertation asks how a dynamic of vengeance involving the United States and anti-imperialist political organizations in the Middle East emerged and persisted between the 1967 Middle East war and the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001. It tracks the construction of channels—ideological, institutional, emotional, and personal—through...
The renewed scholarly interest in the connections between taxation, state building efforts, and long-term economic development has revitalized the study of historical tax systems. How did today’s states initially acquire ‘fiscal capacity’, and why was this process more successful in some places than in others? Since African tax systems are...
This dissertation provides an account of the richest people in Glasgow and Liverpool at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. It focuses on those in shipping, trade, and shipbuilding, who had global interests and amassed large fortunes. It examines the transition away from family business...
This dissertation argues that by examining the networks and advocacy of Americans interested in Lebanon and Lebanese with ties to the U.S., scholars can better understand how relationships cultivated away from the spotlight of policymaker attention have both guided and revealed the limitations of U.S. empire. Activists, both Lebanese and...
This dissertation examines the gradual construction and contested meanings of U.S. slavery’s first western border. According to most historiography, Congress’s Northwest Ordinance of 1787 fixed the meaning of this border at the nation’s inception, constituting the Northwest Territory as the free opposite of slave territories south and west of the...
In March 1977 an exceptionally strong earthquake struck Romania ruled by the communist president and dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his regime. The policies and actions implemented and undertaken in the days, weeks, and year that followed were forms of aftershocks. The Ceauşescu regime modeled the 1977 earthquake recovery on previous...
“The Vicarious Middle Ages” investigates the religious and cultural history of proxy penance where medieval Christians believed that it was possible to suffer on behalf of another person. In proxy penance, one person completed a penitential work for another, who received the spiritual benefit. From the third until the sixteenth...
This dissertation investigates the evolution of national identification and assimilative trends among Germans who remained behind in the Czech lands from the end of the postwar expulsions in 1946 through the Czech Republic’s entry to the European Union in 2004. My primary lens of analysis is associational life, or formal...
During the eighteenth century, European trade with Asia was characterized by the importation of sophisticated manufactured goods in exchange for silver. The features of Euro-Asian trade testify to the vitality of the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese economies in the period before the Great Divergence. Many European observers, however, mistook them...
This dissertation traces the influence of Botatwe farmers' hunting, fishing, and foraging activities on economic, political, and social life over the course of three millennia by weaving together evidence from historical linguistics, archaeology, and palaeoclimatology. While the spread and intensification of farming and trade are often used to explain political...
In a 1980 campaign speech to veterans, Ronald Reagan declared that the United States suffered from a "Vietnam syndrome." The war in Vietnam, Reagan said, had harmed American political life and made the public wary of the aggressive foreign policies Reagan believed were necessary to win the Cold War. I...
This study explores how the world of popular science helped forge a new civic culture during the tumultuous decades of the mid-eighteenth century. I trace the activities of a wide cast of characters in both England and America, revealing the contours of a tightly knit community of scientists, merchants, doctors,...
Forest Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya, 1940-1990s Alphonse Omondi Otieno In the period 1940-1990s, the Kenyan forestry policy evolved from an emphasis on preservation to a combination of programs which embodied both rural Africans' interests and practices and state interests in environmental issues. Using four cases from the western...
Between 1569 and 1582, the inquisitorial court of the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples undertook a series of trials against a powerful and wealthy group of Spanish immigrants in Naples for judaizing, the practice of Jewish rituals. The immense scale of this campaign and the many complications that resulted render it...
This dissertation examines the participation of tens of thousands of African-American servicemen in the occupation of Japan and the Korean war. It poses three questions: how were black servicemen incorporated into a postwar military empire; how did they help shape their nation's expanding Asian protectorate; and how did they understand...
In Muslim West Africa, food-producing villages also produced literate scholars. This study examines how such unlikely intellectuals acquired and gave meaning to Islamic knowledge through one village's experience from 1900 to the 1960s. Unlike the colonial sources underlying conventional approaches to West African Islam, libraries and oral sources from Ruumde...
This project argues that displays of humanist learning in diplomacy served to demonstrate the extraordinary good will of the Florentine regime towards a host ruler. I call this act of surpassing previous oratorical gestures a "cultural gift". Although the singular goal of humanism in diplomacy remained offering cultural gifts in...
"How did the Civil Rights Movement bring about change?" In answer to that question, this dissertation argues that the splintering of purity rhetoric within the intimate environments of home and sanctuary both inhibited and empowered white and African-American religious practitioners to seek social change. To make this argument, this project...
The last two decades in nineteenth-century West Africa witnessed a two-fold movement, namely the territorial expansion of French colonial empire and the first attempts to extend biomedicine through mass vaccination to control smallpox epidemics. This study provides both a deep history and conceptual framework to analyze the relationship between the...
This dissertation explores a seventy-year period of community growth and activism among African Americans in nineteenth-century Iowa, showing how citizenship was defined, contested, expanded and confined. Antebellum black migrants lived on the margins of a hostile society and struggled for equal citizenship using their labor, their community institutions, the legal...
This dissertation, "Myth and the Modern Problem: Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain," argues that a widespread phenomenon best described as "mythic thinking" emerged in the early twentieth century as way for a variety of thinkers and key cultural groups to frame and articulate their anxieties about, and their responses to,...
This study explores the history of Bugwere, Busoga and Buganda, societies in present-day east-central Uganda, from the late first millennium and it does so through a focus on motherhood. Motherhood - as ideology and biology - impacted on almost every aspect of life in these societies, but did so in...
This dissertation examines the history of Mexicans' changing racial status in the Chicago metropolitan region, a place where race has traditionally been understood in strictly black and white terms. From World War I through the 1930's whites violently resisted Mexicans moving into their neighborhoods in Chicago, East Chicago, and Gary,...
In the Old Northwest, networks of activists across dispersed communities took controversial direct action against prejudice and slavery. By largely eschewing the growing cities that disproved the Old Northwest rule, this is a study of reform as it would have impacted most people, at the local level in the smaller...
This dissertation examines the transformation of the city-state of Florence from a republic to a principality during the first half of the sixteenth century. It explores how this fundamental change in political organization altered the culture and society of the Florentine office-holding class. The dissertation describes the course of socio-cultural...
This dissertation examines the nature and development of Protestant ideology in Tudor England. Historians have traditionally seen Tudor Protestants as classic "magisterial" reformers. Unlike "radical reformers," who formed separated sects and rejected the union of church and state, English Protestants are seen as deeply committed to royal authority and the...
The purpose of this project is to investigate the lack of significant reform regarding women’s issues during the perestroika period. Part one establishes the foundational ideology by analyzing Marxist and Leninist ideas on women and comparing them to official Soviet doctrine as established by government officials and leading scholars. Also...
Each successive wave of immigrants to America has faced prejudice founded in fear and uncertainty. Immigrants from Italy were particularly discriminated against in the early years of their arrival, from 1880 through 1920. They faced violence, racial slurs, and media attacks based on an unsubstantiated stereotype of criminality. This project...
This thesis analyzes the role segregation and white flight played in the development of New York City’s suburban Westchester County, particularly in regards to how white flight from (and within) New Rochelle during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was presaged by the racial reification of the suburb’s communal boundaries during...
This dissertation explores the extent to which Portuguese theologian, papal penitentiary, bishop, and abbot Andreas de Escobar, O.S.B. (1348-1448) benefited from contemporary trends in manuscript culture and thereby functioned as a late-medieval public intellectual. Recent research suggests that early-fifteenth-century university-trained theology masters used their expertise and authority to intervene into...
This dissertation explores black litigation strategies, black legal culture, and the effect of black litigation on civil law. Not only did African Americans sue white southerners and white-owned companies for white-on-black violence under Jim Crow, they shared their collective legal knowledge through a network of black newspapers and contributed to...
This dissertation explores the reciprocal relationship between international politics and digital computation since the 1960s by examining the first attempts to use computer simulation to credibly forecast our planet’s economic and environmental future on a global scale. In particular, this project offers the first sustained historical analysis of the origins...
Histories of digital media, software, and computing are inseparable from histories of queer and transgender life. Stored in Memory: Recovering Queer and Transgender Life in Software History situates visual media like video glitch art, the computer’s graphical user interface, video games, and computer operating systems as the product of historical...
Celebrity, reputation, and identity were complex issues for nineteenth-century British actresses. This dissertation examines how actresses responded to, integrated, and defied gender norms and social structures as they performed “authentic” identities for consuming publics. I investigate how actresses participated in charity events and bazaars, autobiographical writing, and advertising campaigns in...
“Musical Networks in Bergamo and the Borders of the Venetian Republic, 1580–1630,” examines the mediation and circulation of northern Italian music through social and professional networks with an emphasis on Bergamo, a thriving musical center during this period. In so doing, I challenge established narratives of early modern history that...
This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion primarily affected African American voters, as it did in the 1860s, politicians did...
Prisoner reentry has become an increasingly popular topic of research in the past few decades due to the phenomenon of mass return as a result of the era of mass incarceration. While research has been done on the experiences of the returning population before mass incarceration, few contemporary researchers have...
Popular histories of United States mass incarceration often focus on federal wars on crime, law and order policing, and the passage of harsh sentencing laws to explain how the United States transformed into the world’s leader in incarceration. My dissertation on the crisis of state prison overcrowding and prisoner resistance...
The Unquenchable Fire examines how the United States outsourced the work and costs of imperialism through arms exports after the Vietnam War. As wartime contracts disappeared and government officials confronted new limits to interventionism, a devastating recession pushed defense contractors abroad in the late 1960s and 1970s. While arms makers...
This dissertation addresses inter alia the problem of certain intertextual discontinuities across Thomas Hobbes’s oeuvre regarding the issue of ecclesiology. I find that these disparities did not result from a change in Hobbes’s private opinions, but from the regicide of 1649 as an event that liberated Hobbes to unveil his...
This study examines how Latino migration politics developed in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1970s. Although scholars usually identify the emergence of Latino immigration activism in the 1960s and predominantly in the region of the Southwest with the farm workers movement, this study argues that immigration activism began much...
This dissertation seeks to explain the discursive origin, development, and transformation of “Republican anticommunism,” and how and why this state-originated ideology continues to shape Vietnamese exile communities today. The dissertation focuses on examining mechanisms that allows certain narratives produced by the Republic of Vietnam to persist, despite the regime changes,...
This dissertation argues that silence played a fundamental role in the Victorian novel and in Victorian novel writing, operating as a productive force in service of sympathetic exchange and creative labor. It examines Charles Lamb's and Thomas Carlyle’s foundational roles in detaching silence from its traditional Romantic associations with solitude,...
After the Second World War, two states claimed to represent the same nation: “China.” This work examines how the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) competed to represent China and the international consequences of that competition. The CPC’s victory in the Chinese Civil War (1946-1949) led to...
This dissertation explores the development of public access cable television programming made by and for LGBTQ people in New York City. Through archival research, interviews with the producers of these shows, and analysis of their content and textual features, I argue that LGBTQ public access programming reflected and amplified particular...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
This dissertation, titled “The Rocket’s Red Glare: Global Power and the Rise of American State Technology, 1940-1960,” makes three distinct but interlocking historical interventions. First, it argues that the rise of technology as a central ideological component of global hegemony represents a historical contingency, rather than a reflexive characteristic of...
“Open Tables: Restaurants and Reform in Progressive Chicago” considers restaurants as contentious spaces where larger debates about gender, class, race and ethnicity, public health, and the role of the state were carried out between the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the 18th Amendment. Using Chicago as...
This project uses the political and environmental history of maquiladoras—duty-free assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border—to offer new insights into two pivotal moments in the history of the U.S political economy: the poverty eradication plans of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the neoliberal growth models of the late twentieth century....
“Los Grans Mals: Disasters and Civic Life in the Late Medieval Midi” examines the many catastrophes that struck the cities of Marseille and Montpellier during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this era, southern Europe witnessed increasingly frequent episodes of natural disasters due in part to the Little Ice...
This dissertation explores an intellectual and political tradition that questioned the use of natural resources and the socioeconomic structures of rural Brazil in the early 20th century. “Organicist agrarianism” postulated an orderly transformation of the Brazil under the guidance of the state in the name of a natural and eternal...
This dissertation examines the role of the Botanic Garden at Buitenzorg, created in 1817, in shaping the practice of colonial agriculture in the Netherlands East Indies. It explores how Buitenzorg and its surrounding highland environs were an ideal place for botanical investigations and agricultural experimentation. The initial task of the...
This dissertation is a history of religious conservatism between 1880 and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Its main argument is that conservative religion in America, rather than being defined by fundamentalism, theological disputes, or cultural antipathy towards pluralism, was an outgrowth of a profound faith in capitalism...
This project traces the efforts by Scottish Protestants to achieve complete religious uniformity in the decades following the Reformation. Discontented with outward conformity, the via media that long characterized our understanding of religious reform in England, Scotland’s ministers sought to work genuine conversions among those who resisted the new order....
Judiciary at the Crossroads argues that a professional judiciary was able to restrain power, and thus lay the foundation for an independent judiciary and possible the rule of law later. Historical evidence comes from the performance of courts in property ordering projects launched by the governments in Taiwan and Manchuria...
This dissertation explores lasting familial relationships and friendships among southern African Americans from the antebellum years to the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on southern Maryland, the dissertation shows how free and enslaved African Americans cultivated familial and non-familial relationships in towns and rural neighborhoods. Over the course of...
This dissertation is a case study of one midwestern city and its Latinx inhabitants. It explores the intertwined pursuit by ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans of inclusion in union and electoral politics. The world of machine politics offered ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans an avenue for inclusion. Central to this...
How we remember, narrate and teach the past is an inherently political and ethical act. This is especially true when teaching about race and racism within the context of United States history. In this dissertation, I ask: how do young people narrate the durability of racial inequality in the United...
Critical pedagogies offer a particular orientation towards education that understands the process of learning as inherently political. These frameworks demand explicit political attention by teachers to support student development of practices needed to create a liberatory world. Recent work evidences the positive impact critical pedagogies have on students academically, civically,...
This dissertation investigates the muscle-powered transport technologies that pervaded the Japanese empire. It examines the production, adoption, evolution, and decline of draft animals, rickshaws, human-powered railways, and push-car railways in Japan and colonial Taiwan, 1850-1930. Invented in Tokyo in 1870, rickshaws proliferated across Asia and became a symbol of modern...
This dissertation traces the historical development of diasporic Filipino American activism after the watershed 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and during the military dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines. Using multi-country archival research and approximately sixty oral history interviews, it analyzes labor, student, anti-dictatorship, and human rights activists...
On March 11, 1966, Indonesian President Soekarno suddenly transferred executive power to the Army, which has played a role in the Indonesian state and society since the late 1950s. This act replaced Soekarno’s own government with a military dictatorship dubbed the New Order, which lasted for nearly 32 years. Why...
This project brings together five editions of a relatively under-studied grimoire, the
"Enchiridion Leonis Papæ", and analyses them for the first time in an academic format. The analysis examines what little has been written about the "Enchiridion Leonis Papæ" as well as its legendary associations with Pope Leo III and...